ePN Expires Affiliate Accounts

I want to take a little time out from my series of tracking the SEO progress of my latest BANS store to discuss the recent ePN (eBay Partner Network) expiries that rocked the world of many affiliates on August 20.

ePN Accounts "Expired" Without Warning

As many who are in any way involved as an affiliate with eBay, there was a round of emails that went out explaining to certain affiliates that their account would be expired in the next 7 days. The letter went on to explain that the reason they would be expired was because the traffic they were sending to eBay was not “sufficiently engaged with the eBay site”. In fact the letter looked like this:

During a recent review of eBay Partner Network publisher accounts and site metrics data for clicks your account drives to eBay.com, we determined that the traffic generated from your account is significantly less engaged with the eBay site as compared to the standards set by our other affiliates. While we appreciate your efforts to drive traffic to our Advertiser sites, we do not think that it is mutually beneficial to further our business relationship at this time. As a result, we will be expiring your eBay Partner Network account in 7 days and we request that you remove all of your eBay Partner Network affiliate links by that time. Payment will take place as per the Network Agreement for any traffic driven to eBay Advertiser sites prior to the expiration date of August 27, 2008.One of our account managers will contact you if a more appropriate business opportunity arises to work together again in the future.

Regards,

The eBay Partner Network

Naturally, the place was in an uproar, and not just from those who received the dreaded letter. Fortunately, I was not one of the affiliates who were singled out, but effect the whole ordeal has had on me has been just as unsettling.

Affiliates Can't Control Traffic

eBay has effectively punished affiliates for something that is completely out of their control. As has been repeatedly been pointed out on the ePN message boards, the job of affiliates is to drive traffic to a store, it’s the job of the store to then convert that traffic into sales. The fact that an affiliate is being penalized because, according to the eBay metrics their traffic isn’t buying as much as someone else’s traffic is nothing short of reprehensible.

The flow-on effect will spread far wider than just the affiliates who have been canned with many others now feeling vulnerable to getting blindsided by a company that has demonstrated an unfeeling, unreasonable attitude to the very people they should be working closely with.

eBay Has Destroyed the Trust

The little communication that has been provided through the ePN discussion board really failed to make clear what affiliates can do in the future to avoid falling under the bar set by eBay that marks your visitors as “not sufficiently engaged to eBay”. What has been explained is that none of the expiries were due to people using blackhat methods to drive traffic. This has only served to further unsettle the masses because it infers that those canned were using legitimate SEO techniques to generate organic search engine traffic.

In other words, what every other legitimate affiliate is doing.

Who Knows Who's Next?

Further fear grew as reports started filtering through that a number of the expired affiliates had been loyal partners who had been with eBay for many years and were generating revenue in the field of more than $10,000 per month. These are significant numbers and would have had to come from sites sitting very high in the SERPs.

This probably means eBay has made enemies of a group of people who are very SEO savvy and these people are now likely going to drive significant chunks of traffic away from eBay. Couple that with the hordes of affiliates who, I imagine, are now turning to alternative, more stable, stores such as Amazon to send traffic and I would think that eBay will feel some fallout from this unfeeling move.

As the hysteria was building, another message came through from eBay which, if it can be believed, may ease the minds of a few people.

According to Steve, the eBay correspondent:

Regarding the “unbans”, we’re looking through all of the emails that we’ve received and are making calls on a case-by-case basis by reviewing the sites in detail as well as the metrics….
Also, to provide a little context for the actions that were taken on Aug 20th, we expired less than 300 publisher accounts. While this does not diminish the impact on the affiliates who were affected, it’s a small fraction of the over 90,000 accounts that were activated since eBay Partner Network launched. Moving forward, we want to make sure we’re working as directly as possible with our affiliates by giving more reporting and insights into performance.

However, it still doesn’t excuse the way in which eBay chose to simply expire accounts without disclosing the conditions that they would like to be met and without warning those affiliates who were being targeted so that they might have a chance to work to meet the conditions.

Speaking personally, when I first heard of the culling I thought it was the beginning of the end (it still might be). The wind certainly went out of my sails and the vigor with which I went about building my latest niche store fell away. I’m only 3 months into this caper and August has been a good month for me, having earned more than $500 so far. I’ve left myself open by not yet diversifying my money making ventures, so I’m using it as a warning to line up more options.

But it also highlighted the importance of getting my stores to the top of the SERPs. If / when I do that, it won’t matter quite so much if I lose my EPN account because I would then be capable of chasing my own leads and offering my site for lease based simply on the fact that I am outranking everyone else.

So I have come out of this experience with a resolve to redouble my efforts to work harder on my stores. It has motivated me to build links, add content and maximize my store’s potential.